My last live ambient stream ended abruptly 8 years ago when Katrina hit New Orleans and cut the power to about the only thing I left going, the ambient server. Here's a list of the last 100 songs played on that stream, left eerily hanging in cyber space.

The hardware/players that I use for my music server work very well. I have instant access to all my music in several rooms of the house; I can sync playback throughout the house if desired. Unfortunately Logitech has dropped the Squeezebox line of players.

The good news is that the Squeezebox community is made of hardware and software developers who now are making open source hardware for the now open source server software. This product will compete with Sonos but will offer two big advantages: lower cost and the playback of hi-res files. Additionally Sonos uses internal memory for its database; that usually fills up at approximately 65,000 files - there are no plans for that to increase that anyone can discern. The disadvantage will be that the new players may not look as good and they will be initially headless without a display, using iOS/Android/computer apps to control the players. They may also require an external DAC which could be an advantage. For those of you contemplating trying out a home music server, this might be an inexpensive route to go.

I had to expand/modify the music server due to running out of storage space on four 2 TB external USB hard drives. I got an 8 hard drive USB 3.0 enclosure and installed 4 hard drives with 10 TB of storage, leaving 4 hard drive spaces unused for future expansion. The "upgrade" is a true upgrade in that I got to unplug all those dang external hard drives, each with their own power brick and USB cord. Now there is one power cord for the enclosure and one USB 3.0 cable.

Station listenership continues to improve with several thousand ambient selections on the playlist. Commercial-free as I pay all the licensing fees. Email me if you want to add some music to the playlist.